It's a new year, but much of the same for Yahoo. After a spending spree in 2013, Yahoo is continuing in the new year with yet another buy-and-shut down episode. The company has just purchased Sparq, noted as a marketing technology startup. Following the acquisition, it promptly shut Sparq down. Reportedly, Yahoo spent just under $2 million on the new firm, which was first founded in 2010 and best known for creating "deep link" tech for mobile apps.

In other words, Sparq figured out an elegant way to link to a very specific spot on a mobile app from a different site; in other words, an email blast could link to an app's purchase page instead of the overall landing page.

The Sparq team will seemingly be joining Yahoo and continuing its efforts there, but obviously Yahoo wanted to prevent this deep linking tech from spreading elsewhere. Or, at least not without paying a license fee to Yahoo. It remains to be seen what all the company plans to do with so many acquisitions in the past 18 months, but we're guessing that the CEO has some sort of plan for the cobbled union of companies.